I
had to laugh when I read the Associated Press piece on Israeli defense
minister Ehud Barak's message to a series of visiting US officials:

"Israeli
officials say they won't warn the U.S. if they decide to launch a
pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, according to one
U.S. intelligence official familiar with the discussions. The
pronouncement, delivered in a series of private, top-level
conversations, sets a tense tone ahead of meetings in the coming days at
the White House and Capitol Hill."

The
traffic between Washington and Tel Aviv has been crowded lately: top US
officials, including the chairman of the joint chiefs, are traipsing to
Israel, "all trying to close the trust gap between Israel and the U.S.
over how to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions," as the AP piece puts
it.

While
diplomats speak a language made up almost entirely of euphemisms, the
reality is that the "trust gap" is a veritable chasm. For the Israelis
to tell us -- their chief benefactors and defenders -- they have no
intention of warning us before undertaking an action which will put US
troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the entire region in mortal danger, is
beyond outrageous. It is an overtly hostile act. In effect, what they
are threatening amounts to the Middle Eastern Pearl Harbor. The irony is
that the means to launch such an attack were given to them by us.

In the second paragraph, the AP puts a polite face on the Israeli threat:

"Israeli
officials said that if they eventually decide a strike is necessary,
they would keep the Americans in the dark to decrease the likelihood
that the U.S. would be held responsible for failing to stop Israel's
potential attack."

One
wonders if the Israelis managed to say this with a straight face. After
all, how would anyone, including the Iranians, know what Washington
knew and when they knew it? The Israelis know perfectly well the US will
be blamed no matter what. Indeed, this is precisely what they are
counting on to carry the day in favor of those arguing for a US strike:
for if the US is going to be blamed in any event, then we might as well
be the ones to take out Iran's nuclear sites, a task the Israelis don't
have the capacity to accomplish cleanly and neatly. If Israel is seen as
the main aggressor, then getting overt support for regime change from
Iran's Sunni neighbors is out of the question: indeed, an Israeli attack
on Tehran will threaten those neighbors with serious destabilization and give impetus to Islamists already in the ascendant in Egypt, Libya,
and Syria. In order to avoid these outcomes, US policymakers could be
persuaded into attacking Iran in order to preempt an Israeli strike.

In
short, the Israelis are pursing a policy that can only be described as
blackmail sui generis. Usually, the blackmailer operates in the
shadows, sneaking about delivering threatening missives to his victims,
all the while taking great pains to cover his tracks. Not the Israelis:
they're doing it right out in the open.

If America were a normal country, this would provoke outrage in our lawmakers and
in the media: they would want to know why a supposed "ally" would
knowingly put American soldiers at risk -- and openly boast about keeping
us in the dark.

When
it comes to Washington's relationship with Israel, however, the US is
very far from normality. The "special relationship" is one of the
hallowed canons of American politics, the one issue that brings together
San Francisco Democrats and Red State Republicans. The Israel lobby is a
unique phenomenon, wielding extraordinary clout not only in the
corridors of power but also in the newsrooms of the "mainstream" media,
where a pro-Israel spin on anything relating to the Jewish state is de rigueur.
As Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer exhaustively document in their
book on the subject, the Israel lobby was instrumental in dragging us
into war with Iraq -- and long ago began the drumbeat for war with Iran.

Tensions
with the Israelis have been on the rise ever since the midpoint of
George W. Bush's second term, when the Washington headquarters of
AIPAC, the powerhouse organization at the Lobby's core, was raided by
the FBI on no less than two occasions. At the same time, two AIPAC
officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, were indicted on charges of
espionage in the infamous Larry Franklin case. Franklin, the Pentagon's
top Iran analyst and an off-the-rails neocon, was convicted of handing
over top secret information to Rosen and Weissman, who promptly handed
it over to Israeli embassy officials. The case dragged on for years,
with the government insisting some portions of the trial had to be kept
off the public record due to the highly sensitive nature of the
evidence. The defense pursued a legal strategy of "greymail" all the way
to the end: the case was eventually dropped, and yet the underlying
issues undermining the "special relationship" continued to worsen as it
became clear Bush wasn't going to follow up his Iraq misadventure with
"shock and awe" over Tehran.

This
worsening of relations accelerated with the election of Barack Obama,
who initially promised what seemed likely to be a more even-handed
approach to the Middle East region, particularly regarding the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Cairo speech, and the subsequent
pressure on Israel to cease building "settlements" on disputed West Bank
real estate had the Israel lobby up in arms. In a tacit alliance with
the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim loons and the Republican politicians who
cater to that crowd, the Israel-Firsters raised a hue and cry: Obama is
"selling out Israel!"

The
way these people howled one would have thought the President was
committing treason against the United States. What's important to
understand, however, is that the Israel lobby doesn't distinguish
between American and Israeli interests. While this may seem like an
extreme position, it fairly represents a distillation of the Washington
consensus: the phrase "no daylight" is often heard when government
officials in both Washington and Tel Aviv discuss Israel's relationship
with Uncle Sam.

Yet
this official fiction is being stretched to the breaking point as the
US and Israel square off over Iran -- and the truth is that it was never a
very convincing fiction to begin with. Every nation has interests unique to itself,
which are perceived through the eyes of its own political leaders. An
alliance, even a long-term strategic relationship, has limits. In
denying this, the pro-Israel crowd is denying the very nature of
nation-states, and indulging in a dangerous fantasy that can only end in
disaster for the US.

A
normal country would answer Israeli efforts to blackmail us into
attacking Iran with a message short and sweet. I would send Zbigniew
Brzezinski over there to tell them what he told the Daily Beast in an interview:

"How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America's worst interest?

ZB:
We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our
airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (ISI, 2008), (more...)